I am attempting to take a screenshot of a tooltip that appears when a user hovers over it, and immediately disappears upon any key press or cursor movement. Unfortunately, this means the typical shortcut I use for screenshots (⌘+SHIFT+4) causes the element to disappear.

Is there any way I can capture this tooltip, preferably without installing any third party software?

You can do this with the Capture > Timed Screen option in the Grab utility. After starting the timer, you'll have 10 seconds to get back to what you want a shot of (including getting the tooltip to reappear). Also, you can use the Grab application's preferences to control whether (& how) the mouse pointer appears in the shot. What it doesn't let you do is choose which region to take a shot of, it just grabs the entire screen; you'll have to crop it appropriately yourself.

If you only want the tooltip in the screenshot (without capturing anything else in the background), a faster way would be to use the keyboard shortcut ⌘⇧4, then position the crosshair over the tooltip, then press space (the crosshair should now turn into a camera). Then simply click on the tooltip, and you’ll get a nice screenshot of it with a transparent background and even its shadow to boot!

⌘+shift+3 should do the trick, it captures the entire screen. The only downsides are that it doesn't grab the cursor as well and depending on what you want you may have to crop it a bit in Preview afterwards.

Thanks, seems like it would be a good solution, however, as soon as I hit ⌘, the tooltip disappears from the screen. This is the case for Stackexchange as well. Maybe it's my browser? edit: Tried the same thing in Chrome, and the tooltip remains. Thanks!
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Ben SiverFeb 25 '14 at 16:13

Ah cool, didn't realize the tooltip behavior could be dictated by the browser. I almost always use Safari so I hadn't noticed it before.
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Mr RabbitFeb 25 '14 at 16:21